Architecture
PaLM and PaLM2 were built on top of Pathways. Pathways is a Google technology that improves the efficiency of training LLMs through data parallelism, model parallelism, and execution-level parallelism.
We will begin with Pathways, the cornerstone of Google AI’s impressive achievements.
Pathways
The title of the Pathways paper may seem esoteric. Pathways: Asynchronous Distributed Dataflow by Barham et al. (2022) indeed appears like something you might want to avoid looking into. However, once you start reading the paper, you will be hooked!
If we look at some of the key features, we are somewhat stunned:
- Heterogeneous execution: Pathways can run programs on many devices, including TPUs, CPUs, and GPUs. This is a significant advance when assembling all the computing power we can get.
- Asynchronous execution: Pathways allows programs to be executed asynchronously. This might seem uninteresting, but PaLM will build on this technology...